Friday, October 28, 2016

Who
can deny that “historian” David Irving is a jerk? A Royal Navy officer’s son, the
boy admired Adolf Hitler. His Fuhrer fondness caused a public scandal in
college. He went on to write about WWII from Hitler’s viewpoint (his mastery of
German did not save him from many errors of fact). And then Irving became the
world’s most famous, anti-Semitic doubter of the Holocaust – a stain not bleached
by his helping to expose the fake “Hitler diaries” (largely to embarrass a more
worthy historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper).

Irving
remains alive at 78, still rather ruggedly handsome. But, given his sordid character,
it’s no wonder that in Denial the famously
homely Timothy Spall plays him like a hybrid of Dracula, Dick Nixon and Spall’s
rodent-faced Peter Pettigrew in the Harry
Potter series. Quite fine as Churchill in The King's Speech, Spall as the cocky Irving comes off as a scowling, deluded gargoyle. In court he faces the American historian he foolishly slandered, Deborah Lipstadt
(Rachel Weisz). Her team of London legal eagles, led on film by Tom Wilkinson and Andrew
Scott, must prove that Irving knowingly lied and ignored facts, to a judge who
is one very hard brick of Britannic cheese.

The
tense story, scripted by David Hare from Lipstadt’s book, plays up Weisz’s use
of a flat, almost grating American accent, high contrast to the verbal brandy
of the Brits. There is too much obvious counterpointing of English formality and
cool, “manly” logic to her volatile feelings. They refused her wish to call
Holocaust survivors to testify, but the bond held.

The
verdict is now history, satisfyingly. Irving never recovered, and has been
reduced to hawking Nazi memorabilia (maybe Donald Trump can recruit Irving to ghost
his political memoirs). Director Mick Jackson keeps it humming, a chill visit to
Auschwitz is haunting, and Wilkinson is wonderful as the lawyer who needs frequent
wine to lubricate his brilliance and his conscience. Denial digs into its story with insight, but this year’s Holocaust
movie remains, certainly, Laszlo Nemes’s amazing Son of Saul (see Nosh 6, below).

Miss Hokusai

I can
be lukewarm about Japanese animé, or Japanimation. So much beauty and imagination!
But also too much quirky plotting, gory violence and sentimentality about big-eyed
cuties. Forget such flaws with Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai. Loosely using history, Hara’s gorgeous film is about
O-ei, daughter of the great painter Hokusai. It takes place in 1814 in Edo, the
future Tokyo.

An artist,
under her father’s haughty thumb and masterful brush, O-ei has spunk and talent.
Her standard task is to ink female figures, but she’s a virgin and the old man declares
that she lacks sensuality. We follow her self-questioning growth as artist and
woman. Hara offers amazing vistas, an imperious concubine, a Godzilla-like Buddha,
dreams, ghosts, a huge fire, fear of sex and death, and a seduction with a
surprise finish. O-ei’s blind little sister is a big-eyed peg for pathos,
and yet handled with such subtlety and tender emotion, why crab about it?

This
may well be a masterpiece (only a savvy Japanese viewer could say for sure).
What held my fascination, along with the wonderful depiction of an era before capitalist
Japan Inc., is the silky, brush-like fluency of Hara’s feel for emotional
changes in a family, the kind that here shapes art on paper and film. When he tops
a river excursion with a surging homage to master Hokusai’s immortal “Great
Wave Off Kanagawa,” he has earned it. For a glimpse of the beauty, see the end
of this Nosh.

Chosen
by Orson Welles to play Helen of Troy in a 1950 Paris show, young Eartha Kitt
remembered being escorted by him at dawn back to her hotel, with Orson spouting yarns and Shakespeare. He also staged fancy cast lunches, where “he ordered
everything for us from soup to nuts (and) wanted a bit of everything” from everyone’s
plates. Welles never, she believed, had to pick up the tab. (Quotation from Barbara
Leaming’s great Orson Welles: A Biography).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Tony
Perkins’s commercial smash was Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho: “Norman’s unity with his dead mother was a warped X-ray of
Tony, who even invented some dialog. Personal subtext came forth screaming:
‘She had to raise me all by herself, after my father died. I was only five.’
Despite his mimetic skills, Perkins refused to do Ma Bates’s voice, perhaps
sensing the arrival of a campy career trap.” That fear was correct. (From the
Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my
book Starlight Rising: ActingUp in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook
and Kindle.)

Friday, October 21, 2016

After
sitting (as I did last Monday) through six preview trailers that seem to jostle
each other in a contagious riot of high-tech, effects-mad hysteria, one fears
that the feature film will be more of the same, like a Trump rant that just
won’t stop. To my relief, Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children takes “event” hysteria down a few notches to become a pleasing
entertainment. After a long, scattered period (though Big Eyes certainly had its moments), director Tim Burton is back in
his groove, using Jane Goldman’s crafty adaptation of the Miss Peregrine novels
of Ransom Riggs.

The
effects are extravagant but not crushing, the CGI and natural vistas are dressed
in elegant depth, and the story favors whimsy on the right side of bonkers.
Burton keeps the narrative thread alive, with enjoyable characters and a
sustained aura of this-must-be-so. The lavishness is lovely, also funny, including
Miss Peregrine herself (Eva Green’s black, sculpted hair crowns her elite
diction). Her grand goth mansion on a wee Welsh isle shelters “peculiar” kids
who have magic powers. Their life is suspended on Sept. 3, 1943, right before a
Nazi bomb will blast it apart. Each day Miss P rolls them back safely in a time
loop, deferring the dreadful moment.

The
awed interloper from now, yet spiritually "peculiar," is Jake (appealing Asa
Butterfield, with big Disney eyes), wired for adventure by the secret tales of his
refugee grandfather; we could use more of Terence Stamp’s great, cathedral
vault voice. Jake meets a blond adorable (Ella Purnell) who commands the wind,
and also a swell swarm of villains, not Nazis but hexed weirdos led by Barron. He
is, happily, Samuel L. Jackson with razored teeth and death-creep eyes. With
his singular splat of savvy Jackson lobs lines like “Boo!” and “I had to
masquerade as a psychiatrist for three weeks – in Florida.”

Burton
has always been a dreamy custodian and archivist, driven by his peculiar taste
(here enhanced by by the story’s jolly-morbid Britishness). Few young viewers
will notice Winston Churchill’s voice on the radio, yet quite a few viewers can
savor the winking curtsies to Groundhog
Day, Titanic, The Lady from Shanghai, Lost Horizon and Ray Harryhausen’s
pioneering animations. At his best Burton is a terrific giggle. His new movie indulges
the big-budget folie de grandeur of a
climax that strives for multiple orgasm, but your imagination has to be pretty
sexless not to enjoy the wallop of his wow.

Harry & Snowman

In
1956 Harry de Leyer, a post-WWII emigrant from ravaged Holland, then a riding
teacher at a posh Long Island school for girls, went to a terminal auction of work
horses. The penetrating gaze of a big white gelding, already truck-loaded for
the “glue factory,” caught his eye. This was love, and for $80 the Dutchman got
the ride of his life. Twice they beat the posh, blueblood steeds in national
show-jumping championships (1958, ’59). The gentle, calm, big-footed champ became
the adored pal of Harry and his eight kids. Eventually the 24/7 horsiness was
too much for Harry’s wife, who left. Workaholic Harry kept training, riding,
jumping.

How
he discovered Snowman’s jumping power is one of the delights of the documentary
by Ron Davis, who previously filmed beauty pageants. Modern interviews intercut
vivid vintage footage, including a startling episode of Harry falling off a
horse but rebounding with a smile (he won the top ribbon). Snowman lived to 28 in
1976 – better bring a hanky for that. Harry, now 89, last competed in 2008. As
a valentine to equine passion, this movie is surpassed only by Buck, Cindy Meehl’s homage to “horse
whisperer” Buck Brannaman. Saddle up.

Citizen
Welles missed his old moviegoing in the ’30s: “You sallied into the theater at
any time of day or night, like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. We never
asked what time the movie began. We’d go down to the Paramount where they had a
double bill, and see the B pictures …There was an actor called J. Carrol Naish.
Anything he did, we’d laugh at.” (From My
Lunches With Orson by Henry Jaglom and Peter Biskind.) For the record,
ethnic specialist Naish did some good work, and gained Oscar nominations for Sahara (1943) and A Medal forBenny (1945).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

A
film “starts with the find of the location,’ said (cinematographer) Robby
Muller. Wim Wenders agreed: ‘If I don’t have a gut feeling about the place, I
don’t know where to put the camera.’ They were John Ford devouts, and without
pedantry Muller evoked Winton Hoch’s majestic landscapes for The Searchers. Hoch seems to mural the
West from horseback, Muller snaps it through a car window. Hoch echoes painter
Frederic Remington, Muller the classic modern road-shooter Robert Frank.” (From
the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas
chapter of my book Starlight Rising:
ActingUp in Movies, available
via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

Friday, October 14, 2016

It
must have seemed like a bravura coup to writer and director Nate Parker: highjacking
the title of D.W. Griffith’s fabled and infamous The Birth of a Nation. In 1915 Griffith boldly advanced a young art
form and gave us our most potent vision of the Civil War era. But – his big,
nostalgic blunder – he indulged his fantasy about the Ku Klux Klan as a Christian crusade of white knights, out to protect their
damsels from black lust.

The
movie was a huge success and was screened for years, not just in the South. It
set the stage for David O. Selznick’s romantic magnolia binge, Gone With the Wind. A counterpoint rebuke, James W. Noble's The Birth of a Race (1918), gained little attention outside a few "colored" theaters. A movie like
Griffith’s cannot be made again, for which the verdict a century later is “thank
God.” Parker, a black actor directing his first feature, has every right to select
his own terms of racial payback. After all, the white author William Styron
took the moldering facts about Nat Turner, who in 1831 led a bloody slave
rebellion in Virginia, and wrote a controversial, Pulitzer Prize’d novel, The Confessions of NatTurner (1967).Styron is now on a dusty shelf, Griffith is
an easy target, and Turner is a martyred, partially mythic piece of history, still ripe
for use.

Sadly
that does not excuse Parker's liberation saga which, despite some glints of power, wraps history and
myth, religion and revenge, inside a blubber ball of chunky clichés and clunky
tactics. The whites are nearly all rustic brutes, though a pale plantation lady
gives kid Nat a Bible and teaches him to read. Still, he’s sent back to sweat
in the cotton fields for her son, a boozing hayseed and brooding cyst of guilt. Nat has
a preacher gift, but takes quite some time to reckon that the whites are
exploiting him to sedate slaves with religion (very little Jesus, mostly
Old Testament). Periodic acts of sadism keep us involved before the blowout
revolt, ordained not only because Nat is now a vengeful “prophet,” but
because the plot pressure can only be vented in a grisly hallelujah of violence
(almost 300 died).

As
director, Parker favors glossy, picturesque vistas, wallopingclose-ups, and the facile branding of stick
figures which Griffith was already trying to reach beyond in 1915. A central problem is his
performance as Turner. Parker has warm eyes and a big, sunrise smile, but after
so much suffering the effect of that charm starts to make Nat seem too simple, if
not quite a servile Uncle Tom (speaking of which, Samuel L. Jackson’s Tom tactics as a
cunning, two-faced mansion slave in DjangoUnchained had more layers of nuance than
Parker ever manages). The performances are highly posed and often hackneyed, without the impact of Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh and H.B. Walthall in Griffith’s
silent picture. Parker uses rape to oil rage, and for tragedy invokes Strange Fruit, the powerful Billie
Holiday song against lynching.

12 Years a Slave, a touch pedantic but richly dramatized, showed us vile plantation cruelties as well as any film has. Quentin Tarantino’s Django took the whole, lurid package to
a new level of crafty melodrama. Parker’s Birth has been ambushed
by news about his tainted sexual past (while in college he was accused, then acquitted of rape). Beyond that controversy, any serious look tells us the movie just isn’t very good.

SALAD (A List)

By
my reckoning, The Ten Best Slave-themed
Movies are: Spartacus (Kubrick,
1960), Amazing Grace (Apted, 2006), Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), Burn! (Pontecorvo, 1969), Mandingo (Fleischer, 1975), The Ten Commandments (De Mille, 1956), Amistad (Spielberg, 1997), The Autobiography ofMiss Jane Pittman (Korty, 1974), Slaves (Biberman, 1969). Obviously,
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is
in its own category, as both a great film and a history travesty.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A
strong Roosevelt liberal, Citizen Welles was urged to run for the U.S. Senate in
Wisconsin against a paunchy young Republican “war hero,” Joseph R. McCarthy.
The real problem, as he said later, was “Joe McCarthy had the dairy people
behind him and there was no way to beat him.” Orson didn’t run, “and that’s how
come there was a McCarthy. It’s a terrible thing to have on your conscience.”
But 1946 was a big Republican year; it also gave us Richard M. Nixon. (From Barbara
Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No
one is funnier in The Producers than
Estelle Winwood, 84, prim but sparky and sex-minded as an old widow: “Mel
Brooks recalled that ‘she poked Zero in unmentionable places.’ On hitting 100
she would sigh, ‘I wouldn’t mind being dead. It would be something new.’ Of The Producers she said, ‘I must have
needed the money.” (From the Zero Mostel/The
Producers chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Kindle, Nook and Amazon.)

Mark
Wahlberg is the quality hamburger of stars (Dwayne Johnson is more like butt steak, Vin Diesel a wiener with attitude). Wahlberg’s macho appeal is so sturdy and
grounded that when you match him with Kurt Russell, who achieved similar
effects long before, you have the support beams for a disaster whopper like Deepwater Horizon. The name belonged to
a huge British Petroleum-leased oil rig off the Louisiana coast, above a mile of water. "The well from hell," says a worker on film, but for the 126 rig occupants it was a living (and for 11 of them, a dying).

The movie directed by Peter Berg points a finger at corporate
profit-over-prudence, like skipping a $125,000 cement pressure test. Those saved
dollars turned into billions lost, once the Horizon became (April 20, 2010) a
fireball of frying, flying metal. The underwater spill polluted the Gulf Coast
for 87 days (and how many decades?). Rig manager Mike Williams (Wahlberg), heroic
in the crisis, soon left the offshore petro-biz. His boss “Mr. Jimmy” Harrell
(Russell), full of outspoken doubts before the disaster, stayed in the trade. A
convenient (real?) villain personifies BP, oozing a Dixie accent like a one-man
oil leak; John Malkovich’s reptile gaze and cocky idiocy echo his psychotic
Cyrus the Virus in Con Air.

Berg and a fine cast (including Kate Hudson as
Williams’s wife) are basically lubing the lavish, creaky machinery. We feel viscerally
on the rig as it clanks, sputters, shakes and then blows. The shock and fear are
like multipliers of the derrick disaster in There
Will Be Blood (anyone who misses John Wayne’s The Hellfighters should be left on the rig). Remember James Dean’s
joy in Giant, when his well became a
glorious gusher? Here that dream dies. Although a frantic seabird crashes into
a control room, thismovie never gets a
grip on the vast environmental cost, which is rather like making a Katrina film
without mentioning New Orleans. (Still, it's a swell platform for Kurt Russell. For all who love King Kurt, I recommend Scott Marks's ace interview with him, in the Movies section of the current sandiegoreader.com)The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The
Touring Years

That
title is ridiculously long for a simple, endearing documentary that should have
been released as Beatles!, or maybe Fab Forever. Ron Howard directed (more
like pasted) this scrapbook of period clips and modern interviews, including band
survivors Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. For us vintage viewers, it’s
timeless. I recall the Beatles, drowned out by fans when I went with pal Mike
Walters to a Chicago showing of A Hard
Day’s Night. Here they are again, those swarming, screaming girls, as
if recorded on eternal ear wax.

The
Beatles came out of Liverpool by way of Hamburg and Ed Sullivan, toured for a
few giddy years, disbanded a few years later. The Rolling Stones rock on, into fossil
twilight, but mere longevity can’t beat the Beatles. This zippy dossier of
their heyday brings back just how fresh, keen, funny and creative they were, the
four unique lads making the best tunes of a troubled decade. Whoopi Goldberg,
former screamer, offers a quiet salute: “I never looked at them as white guys.
They were the Beatles.” Nobody is too old, too young or too jaded for this
pleasure. It will, in this angry year, de-Trump your brain.

Put
together on the run across Europe, using a patchwork budget and actors caught
between other, better-paying projects, the Fifties noir mystery Mr. Arkadin is a Wellesian wonder. Or as
a great critic said, “a kaleidoscope of signs, and like a brainteaser of clues.
The truth rises up in fragments, is shattered, is recomposed and finally is
discovered whole: the terrible secret of Arkadin is that he has no secrets.”
(Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, A Twentieth
Century Job, 1991)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Sometimes
an actor has one indelible role, worthy to last. In The Horse’s Mouth (1959), “Mike Morgan had few lines, but each
arrives as touching or funny, not so much hobbled by his stutter as made
achingly sincere. During the editing, Morgan died from meningitis, which puts a
heart flutter in Jimson’s toast, ‘Young man, I drink to your gloomy future.’
For me the endearing actor still mirrors my young dream of art.” (From the Alec
Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter in
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

David Elliott's book

About Me

David Elliott was film critic of the Chicago Daily News, USA Today, San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN.com, The Reader (San Diego), and covered arts and entertainment for the Chicago Sun-Times. Retired but not hibernating, he lives in green Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Travis Elliott.)